Bay is one of the guys who does CGI right though. He integrates practical effects as much as he possibly can because he understands that’s what keeps them grounded and real looking. Again, in that scene I linked to he cut a goddamn bus in half. Compare the 2007 CGI in Transformers with the CGI in Black Panther. It’s astounding how well Bay’s action sequences hold up in comparison.
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I mean yeah sure, die hard kicked ass and point blant is a Cult classic but so is The Dark Knight rises…
Your correct that Marvel overall though is crap.
Wait am I reading this right?
All of 22 got only 4x the post we got last week?
How can that be?
Unstuck is doing very well (and has some pretty high volume contributers, er not counting the Trump bot);
2+2 has been in decline for years and obviously they are not too competent at doing anything to change that
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I hope they charge a fuckload for the sponsored forums, because they’d be lucky to clear $500/month in advertising with that traffic.
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What in the actual fuck?
Was rooting for driver to get out of the car and give her a beatdown, assuming there is not something important before camera was rolling that was omitted.
Is car in the crosswalk that big a deal? Depending on the flow of traffic it seems kind of unavoidable depending on when the lights change and what the cars in front of you are doing.
Yes I hope so too.
I actually re-watched this recently because a podcast I listen to had an episode about it. I’d forgotten how brutal that movie is, considering it’s a kids movie. Like, Optimus Prime and all your favorite good guys get killed. That shit must have traumatized a whole lot of kids back in the day. Also Orson Wells is in it for some damn reason.
SE was huge for them and the volume there is basically dead rn
Bay has a good eye for setpieces but the Transformers movies have too much crap jammed onto the screen. Just too busy and it comes out as a mess as a result. Bit like the Star Wars prequels, it’s dangerous to allow directors to just do whatever they want.
Also cutting a bus in half is hardly baller lol, that’s standard action movie stuff. If you want to talk about baller undertakings to avoid CGI, James Cameron built a goddamn scale replica of the Titanic.
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How much do you think MM would sell 22 for? Well I guess he’d have to sell the publishing business too. Hmm.
Imagine being the dominant poker site (by far) in the early 2000s and making basically no money while online poker exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry, instead opting to work on “2+2 magazine.” Then, after blowing the biggest 8-9 figure layup in business history, having that attitude. Just a straight up fucking moron.
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There have been too many good action movies of late to have to praise the Transforners movies. Marvel movies are just above average, but the first Avengers was pretty well shot action wise.
Pacific Rim did everything Transformers wanted to do better, but perhaps was a bit too dark in tone (all the action happening at night).
Mad Max is the obvious choice to praise.
Mission Impossible and John Wick franchises have been great with low amounts of CGI.
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I don’t like Marvel movies so maybe I’m biased but they just seem like jumbled messes visually. More TV shows than cinema; even shows like Breaking Bad or Ozark have more visual flair than the Marvel movies do. I’ve never been mesmerized by a scene in a Marvel movie. I have by a Michael Bay movie, even a bad Michael Bay movie.
Pacific Rim looked good but Transformers was filmed a decade before Pacific Rim was, and still looks good. Mad Max was the greatest action movie of all time so yeah it’s better than a Michael Bay flick. It’s better than everything. And OK MI and Wick look good and are good, but that doesn’t mean that Bay doesn’t shoot a hell of an action scene. You don’t HAVE to praise Bay’s action, but all I did was make an offhand comment that his action scenes and VFX shots are Actually Good, and ones from 20 years ago hold up surprisingly well.
It’s mostly a matter of money, enough money gets you enough time to do right so it looks as good as it can with the current technology. Directors like Bay get enough money, and know how to use it, to make stuff that holds up.
I guess that my main disagreement is that Bay has managed to incorporate CGI in a way that doesn’t suck. Bay is a good action director, like I managed to enjoy The Rock despite it being a cheesy as hell movie and me being usually unable to tolerate Nicholas Cage. Bay’s CGI stuff still looks like dogshit to me though.
As much as it pains me to admit, it might just be that I’m an old. High frame rate video looks bad to me; sets look like sets, actors look like actors. The air of unreality that 24 FPS produces is necessary for suspension of disbelief. Maybe if you’re brought up on CGI, the unreality of it is just part of a movie-watching experience.
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I haven’t seen much Michael Bay, but I’m pretty sure it all sucks. The Rock might have been tolerable if you were a teenager when it came out. Sean Connery is cool and all, but it wasn’t enough. Pain and Gain might be his least sucky movie.
There’s an absolute ton of CGI in Mad Max, it’s just there’s a lot of practical stuff too. Think this discussion’s been had before, but I’m just about old enough to remember when people talked about ‘special effects’ the way they now talk about CGI, and it’s amazing how seamlessly ‘special effects’ have been retrospectively sanctified now there’s a new whipping-boy in town.
There’s an argument that it makes film-makers lazy, and I guess it can, but that’s at least as much to do with broader changes in the industry, where it’s become much more highly-geared, much more dependent on a small number of must-be-hits. The action scenes for a tentpole movie are usually sketched out, blocked and budgeted before the script is even written, for example, and that’s true regardless of CGI. Filmmakers in those conditions aren’t really free not to be lazy.
Aside from that, most objections ultimately boil down to being able to tell that it’s CGI. Well guess what, I can tell when it’s puppets, when it’s forced perspective on a scale model. You’d better believe I can tell when it’s old-school bluescreening with thick matte-lines. The priming effect is so huge, as shown by this exchange that did some numbers on Film Twitter when the Terminator with her off GoT came out:
Christ, am I ever glad I didn’t read this right before bed.
I lose my shit over regular bees, can’t imagine running into one of these nightmares.
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The transformers movies are a visual disaster. Objectively so. It’s not relevant that a single frame might look ok. It’s the fact that he smash cuts a jumbling whirl of incomprehensible blurs of colour and noise and calls it a scene. There is no choreography of the action.
Add to that the total contempt for character or story and you get the worst cinema has to offer.
He ends up with a Jackson Pollack, but without the intention of form.